Cover Your Media Center with a Pixel-Perfect Dice Image

Looking for a way to jazz up your IKEA furniture? If you're not down with the look of messy paint or stick-on decals, try this pixelated project on for size. Using a bit of glue and a bunch of dice, one IKEA hacker customized his media center—and you can do it too!

Robert Brauer, an Interaction Designer based in London, thought the 4x4 IKEA Expedit shelving he uses as a stereo cabinet needed a little pick-me-up. As a long-time lover of pixel artwork, he thought he could achieve a cool look by covering the doors of his shelving unit with a curtain of black dice.

By plotting out an image of italian spaghetti-western "uber hero" Bud Spencer, he was able to rotate and arrage the dice to create the illusion you see here. The total cost for the project? 90€, or around $120 US, which includes 3,000+ black dice (found on eBay) and four of IKEA's $20 door inserts for the Expedit.

Although the project takes some time and lots of patience (just check out the video above), it's definitely something you can tackle at home as a DIY project.

Using Robert's technique, you can turn any image into a dice map with a simple image editor like Photoshop or one of these free alternatives. Robert basically explains the process on his blog:

"Basically, we converted a variety of images into a monochrome version, scaled it down to a reasonable amount of pixels and subsequently posterized the image to 6 levels of grey that we could easily replace with one of the faces of a die."

You can see the process in action through these photos of the Mona Lisa:

Robert designed a web tool to do the work for you here, but we can't get it to work for us. Still, it should be a fairly easy project for somebody with basic Photoshop knowledge. Now all you need to do is glue a few thousand dice down to your media cabinet.